


This is Not A Love Song

by stickmarionette



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Alchemy, Canon - First Anime, Canon - Manga, M/M, Unreliable Narrator, gen if you squint the right way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-21
Updated: 2010-07-21
Packaged: 2017-10-24 06:41:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stickmarionette/pseuds/stickmarionette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“Brother…why are you always so mad at the Colonel?”</i></p><p>The answer to this question isn’t what you think it is.  Why is Roy the only one who knows how to control Ed?  The answer to that question isn’t what you think it is either.  Slight mixing of anime and manga universes.</p><p>Written in 2005.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is Not A Love Song

“Brother…why are you always so mad at the Colonel?”

Ed didn’t speak, because he knew Al would not take his silence as an insult, and because it wasn’t an easy answer. It was never easy to explain the way he thought about these things.

Al knew him best, came the closest to understanding the way his mind worked. But even that closeness had its limitations. He always knew in the back of his mind that he was different from other people, even before the stormy night when he had faced the Gate and the Truth and demanded concessions from the fundamental principle that governed his world.

Equivalent trade.

At first, he’d simply assumed that it was an alchemist thing, and he’d been partially correct. Those who were talented enough to understand and make use of the power that was available to them were different from ordinary people. They were different in ways that were awe-inspiring and horrifying at the same time, because alchemy required not only a natural inclination for it, but also incredible dedication to endless study and research.

One could say that it required not only an intelligent mind, but also an obsessive nature. Ed was exactly that – he has never had cause to doubt the first, and he is self-aware enough that he knows the second to be true.

So, alchemists were strange creatures, with their own codes and symbols and rules of conduct. Even more so for the State Alchemists, because what they had given up in exchange for the privileges was so much more than any normal person would understand. Soul-selling was much too simplistic a term for it.

They were the elite, no doubt, but they were also the most eccentric and impossible people in a social group full of eccentric and impossible people. Beneath the veneer of their pretensions at normality the essence of what it meant to be an alchemist remained, even for those who preferred to hide their less-than-normal side.

Like the Colonel, for example. Whatever else Ed could say about the man, he knew that underneath the military polish, the grand ambition and the political games, there was still an alchemist. Probably a very good alchemist, which implied any number of things, about obsession and dedication and other alchemist staples he didn’t particularly want to associate with a man like the Colonel.

Still, once an alchemist, always an alchemist. That was how Ed first understood their arrangement – in alchemist terms, when an ordinary person would have used terms like ‘blackmail’ and ‘coercion’. The Colonel kept his secret and let him go on his wild goose chases, and he kept his mouth shut about the Colonel’s ambitions and did his dirty work to push the man ever higher up the ranks. They accommodated each other’s obsessions.

Equivalent trade.

He was comfortable with such arrangements - his world ran on trades, and alchemists understood such things between themselves. Ed wasn’t an ordinary person. He wasn’t even an ordinary alchemist. The arrangement was not the reason he tried to avoid the Colonel like the plague and why he became a snarling ball of tension around the man. Ed was fine around the other alchemist when the Colonel owed him a favour, after all. He could even say he enjoyed Mustang’s discomfit at being indebted. No, it was something else that prevented him from accepting the man at face value.

Ed wasn’t blind. He knew that Mustang cared for and protected him and Al far beyond the boundaries of duty. The man would risk a great deal for them. That was precisely the problem.

The Flame Alchemist understood equivalent trade well enough. So what did he want in exchange for what he gave?

\--

Nobody else can control Fullmetal quite as well as he can. There is a good reason for this.

Nobody else seems to realize just how incredibly screwed up Fullmetal’s mind is.

Because the boy is fundamentally fucked in the head, more than anybody else Roy has ever met, and considering _himself_ , that is quite something.

Maybe that’s why he understands.

Even Alphonse, much as he might be his brother’s soul mate in everything else, doesn’t seem to get it. It is through no fault of his own – he’s just too absorbed in his brother’s world, and that has warped him as it would anybody else in his position. And of course the younger Elric has enough of his own demons to deal with.

It took the flames and dust of Ishval to drive him to human transmutation, and even then he’d had only theory. Two innocent children, who had seen nothing of the horrors of the world, compelled only by love – that was a horrifying thing indeed.

Incredible genius isn’t the only requirement for a child to attempt it, survive and then succeed at yet another human transmutation, all in the same breath. The other, if it can be called a requirement, is probably best described as sheer obsessive insanity.

The scariest part of this is probably the fact that he _can_ relate to the more than slightly mad bundle of energy that is the Fullmetal Alchemist. Obsession, ambition, and focus – yes, he can understand those qualities far too well.

Perhaps that is why he bends the rules of their relationship of equivalent trade, makes these concessions and goes out of his way to help. Yes, it’s a perfectly rational explanation, one he is happy to arrive at.

Perhaps that is all.

\--

Ed didn’t hate the Colonel, but that meant nothing. There were lots of people he _didn’t hate_.

He liked the man, sometimes. Moments like when they sat up over alchemy books and research in the Colonel’s office, studying for their evaluations over coffee; when a new book he’d been fruitlessly searching for would be handed to him without a word after a difficult case, well resolved; when he sat curled on the sofa, reading, and listened with half an ear to the Colonel’s murmurs about the recent political upheaval; when there was no speech between them at all, only silence and erratic heartbeats – those times were fine, even enjoyable.

They worked together perfectly well in the quiet white spaces encompassed by equivalent trade, undisturbed by secrets and lies. At times like those, Ed could almost believe that there might be something more to their stilted friendship, something not enveloped by the boundaries of his world.

His uncertainty ate at him, fuelling the violent eruptions of temper he was still prone to in front of the Colonel inside working hours. Sometimes, it fuelled equally violent passions in other directions.

There were lots of people he _didn’t hate_. There weren’t nearly as many people who fell under _liked, sometimes_.

\--

 _Fullmetal, welcome back._

 _Yeah, like you missed me, Colonel bastard._

 _  
Fullmetal, how was West City?_

 _Boring and useless, like you knew it would be, you bastard Colonel._

 _  
Fullmetal, why don’t you stay awhile?_

 _No, I don’t think I will, Colonel._

They don’t use each other’s names very much, only titles. Despite popular speculation, he does actually know Fullmetal’s name and often contemplates using it, just for the reactions. In fact, he has recently started using it in his head for no reason he can easily discern.

Roy thinks that the betting pool should really be on whether Edward remembers _his_ name, and for some reason that makes his chest ache, vaguely and distantly. Perhaps all this weirdness is strangely appropriate, applied to the state of their – association? Liaison? What?

Edward does not see what they have as a _relationship_. To him, it is merely more of the same – equivalent trade.

Roy is honestly beginning to hate those two words.


End file.
